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Feeling a bit stuck? Can´t work out why your student is so demotivated? Not sure how to approach exam classes?

Teaching Development is here to help you develop your students and yourself. If you´re looking for support and ideas, you might be interested in:

Looking for solutions outside the teaching world: how not to let graded observations de-motivate you, especially if you are looking for genuine solutions or practical ways to improve.

Who develops you?In the teaching world we have become more and more focused on a learner-centred approach, and while this is no bad thing, I sense that we are often left with a gap: we develop our method through numerous INSETS, but do we develop ourselves as teachers? Terms such as ‘good teacher’ or ‘outstanding teacher’ have been hi-jacked (certainly in the UK) by regulation and inspectors. And the whole debate appears to have shifted into measuring the process over the impact.

Tired of your students´ passivity and reliance on you as the teacher? Wanting to get your students more involved in their learning process? This article will help you understand why your students may not as yet be at the heart of their learning journey, and offer you one key activity to do with your students to set them on their way.

Immersed in skills teaching, language teachers can be quick to notice a reading or writing issue. But how do you address it? And when is it more than the normal challenge students face when learning a new language? What ideas and resources are out there? This post gives a quick overview to what dyslexia means, how it feels for the student and the overlap between language learning and cognitive processing.

Many of us get stressed when taking exams. Unfortunately, teachers sometimes have little training in this area to help students . This post will invite you to consider different cultural reasons for the build-up of stress in your students and will offer you six classroom activities to give your students the tools to alleviate their stress themselves and to help each other.

Have you tried student-made quizzes only to realise that student’s aren’t that great at writing questions? Have they turned out to be more trouble than they are worth? Well, that’s probably because they need some training. Here’s a lesson ideathat you can use to demystify the reading exam.

Would you like to keep all your online resources in one handy place and let your students access folders so they can work autonomously online? If you’re interested in mobile learning, check out this post on how I use Edmodo with my class.

2 comments

I have just completed an OCR Level 5 specialist teaching course (dyslexia) for primary aged children and it is really interesting to see how many of the teaching strategies we have learnt are recommended here for dyslexic adults learning a second language; the kinaesthetic approach being important for many learners. On our course, as well as teaching through touch and the visual we have been encouraged to ask our learners to verbalise what they have learnt as much as possible. This is based on the fact that people remember: 30% of what they see, 50% of what they say and 90% of what they hear, say and do.